It’s the political parlour game equivalent of Where’s Wally? Where’s Malcolm?

Well here’s where he was last night — talking to Tony Jones on Lateline …

“If you believe there is not going to be any global action and that the rest of the world will just say, ‘It’s all too hard and we’ll just let the planet get hotter and hotter,’ … and you want to abandon all activity, a scheme like that is easier to stop …

“A direct action policy, where the government or industry was able to freely pollute, if you like, and the government was just spending more and more taxpayers’ money to offset it, that would become a very expensive charge on the budget.”

“A scheme like that” and “a direct action policy” are, of course, his own party’s climate change policy, which has not only been widely discredited by climate experts but, as Bernard Keane reports today in Crikey, has just blown out its cost base.

Like any senior politician with smarts, Turnbull knew exactly what he was saying last night. He could have refused to engage with his interviewer or stopped talking at any time. He didn’t.

With colleagues such as Turnbull, the federal opposition and its climate policy are hardly in a warm place.